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The Effect of the Voting Advice Application on Decision-Making in the 2023 Presidential Election in the Czech Republic
Králová, Anna ; Vinopal, Jiří (advisor) ; Linek, Lukáš (referee)
There are many ways in which we obtain the information on which we make decisions, and this is true for everyday decisions as well as electoral ones. This paper directly addresses the topic of voting advice applications (VAA), specifically the election calculator, in the context of the third direct election of the President of the Czech Republic in 2023. The aim was to uncover what effect the election calculator has on voting decisions in this particular election. The research involved an experiment supplemented by pretest and posttest questionnaires with 105 participants. Based on the research results, I was unsuccessful in confirming the research hypothesis about the "volební kalkulačka" effect. Thus, I have not been able to show that the participants would change or shape their voting decisions following the resulting recommendation of the "volební kalkualčka". However, despite these findings, and based on the other findings of the thesis, I can summarise that research participants perceived the VAA as a rather beneficial, helpful way of obtaining information during the pre-election period. Key words voting advice application, voter decision-making, presidential election, experiment
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Opinion leadership and social-media influencers
Mejzr, Vojtěch ; Vinopal, Jiří (advisor) ; Linek, Lukáš (referee)
(in English): The thesis dealt with the context of young people's electoral participation in the Czech Parliamentary elections in 2021 and the exposition to two social media influencers (SMI) who, before the elections, tried to mobilize young people to participate through their content on social media. It is precisely SMI, due to their specific position, who are often associated with the ability to function as opinion leaders on social media. Until recently, research on this effect has been examined mainly in relation to consumer behavior and marketing. However, newer studies show that the para-social relationships that young people manifest towards SMIs and the ability of social-media influencers to mediate information and reduce its complexity, can also play a role in political participation for young voters. Thus using cross-sectional analysis of primary data, the work empirically tests this influence for two selected SMIs in context of the 2021 elections - Jakub "Kovy" Kovář and Martin "Mikýř" Mikyska, and shows that in relation to voter turnout, engaging with their content had a significant effect on the group of followers who are closest to them. Furthermore, tthe influence was higher the less these followers were interested in politics and political content. The study thus offers empirical...
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Essays on political careers in the Czech Republic
Škvrňák, Michael ; Linek, Lukáš (advisor) ; Kouba, Karel (referee) ; Maškarinec, Pavel (referee)
This dissertation focuses on political careers in the Czech Republic. The in- troductory part of the dissertation presents several approaches for describing and explaining the development of political careers, ranging from the theory of rational choice through biographical approaches to an institutional view of the careers. After the theoretical introduction, four empirical chapters fol- low. They focus on particular aspects related to political careers. The first describes the candidate selection process in the Czech Pirate Party before the 2020 regional election and the 2021 parliamentary election and explains the success of individual nominees by their position within the party, personal at- tributes and political experience. This chapter uses the supply and demand model of candidate selection. The second empirical chapter focuses on local politics, specifically on the incumbency advantage. It shows that if a munici- pality publishes a municipal newsletter, incumbents, especially mayors, benefit from it. The following chapter focuses on coalition formation in Czech munici- palities, which is a process that determines which party will fill a mayor's office. The chapter shows that besides standard aspects of coalition formation, social capital of elected deputies plays a role in the process. In particular,...
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Support for income redistribution and its determinants in Europe between 2002 and 2019
Petrúšek, Ivan ; Linek, Lukáš (advisor) ; Katrňák, Tomáš (referee) ; Gerbery, Daniel (referee)
This cumulative dissertation consists of four research papers and examines support for income redistribution in Europe between 2002 and 2019. All analyses use the first nine rounds of the European Social Survey (ESS) merged with country-level contextual information from external databases (OECD, Eurostat, and SWIID). The reported results are fully reproducible. The descriptive analysis shows how trends in redistribution support differ by welfare regime. Except for a few countries, aggregate redistribution support was relatively stable over the studied period. Material self-interest theories conceptually frame and motivate the conducted analyses. The main research themes focus on the contextual effects of unemployment rates on pro-redistributive attitudes and how being unemployed and personal experience with long-term unemployment correlate with redistribution support. Results demonstrate that country-level structural unemployment positively correlates with aggregate redistribution support, whereas cyclical unemployment does not generally correlate with aggregate redistribution support in Europe. At the individual level, the unique analyses demonstrate that controlling for experience with long-term unemployment dramatically reduces the effect size of being unemployed, thus questioning almost unison...
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Post-Political Dimensions of Urban Planning in Prague
Lamken, Josef ; Sládek, Jan (advisor) ; Linek, Lukáš (referee)
The aim of this thesis is to provide a theoretical synthesis of the current literature reflecting upon the post-political critique of urban planning in the theoretical section, which is then applied to the context of urban planning in Prague in the empirical section. The post-political line of thought takes a critical view of recent efforts to render urban planning more inclusive, asserting that by focusing on consensus-building, planning practices exclude the emergence of the political; the fundamentally conflictual nature of politics as described by Chantal Mouffe and Jacques Rancière. The critique suggests that participatory planning practices can be effective at upholding the hegemonic order by which the city is constituted, by pacifying the antagonistic forces that challenge it. In the empirical section, the applicability of this critique within the context of Prague's urban planning process is examined. This is achieved through a case study of the efforts of the Prague Institute of Planning and Development (IPR) to develop a new land use plan, while dealing with dissent from a prominent antagonistic actor - the NGO Arnika.
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The devil in the details: Influence of group characteristics on voting behavior in the Slovak National Council as seen through multiplex social network analysis
Harvan, Samuel ; Pilnáček, Matouš (advisor) ; Linek, Lukáš (referee)
(in English): Many non-political factors have significant influence on the many ways of decision-making in politics. Researchers like Masket (2008) found a significant relationship between seating arrangements in parliament and the decisions that the seated politicians take. More interesting, however, are findings by Tunkis (2016) or Škvrňák (2021) that show how social factors influence decisions made in political organizations. However, literature is not clear on the question of how sociodemographic factors like gender or ethnicity wield significantly influence political decision- making. These studies are few and far between and do not focus on countries in the CEE region, like Slovakia. Atop of that, literature on this topic does not use social network analysis, which provides several advatantages that this thesis considers as worth exploring. One of them is the concept of optimal graph partitioning, which finds natural groups of like-minded nodes in terms of their links. This is exploited in an interesting way in a paper by Arinik, Figueiredo & Labatut (2020), which aims to analyze the Euroepan Parliament by mapping them onto multiplex signed graphs, which introduce more complete mapping of social organizations that contain a mechanism of internal conflict. This thesis tries to apply the method...
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Election Opinion Polls Interpretation
Zeman, Michal ; Vinopal, Jiří (advisor) ; Linek, Lukáš (referee)
The thesis examines election polls media coverage with the goal to understand the structure of the polls media coverage, describe its problems, and contribute to their elimination. Using the framework of news values and commercial news values, the matter is first examined by content analysis on the case of the 2021 elections to the Czech Chamber of Deputies online media coverage. The polls are found to be extensively covered by the Czech online media. The articles are mostly based on the game metaframe with the metaphors of horse race and theater, limiting the voter agency. The greatest emphasis is assigned to calling winners of the polls, changes in the support, and 5% threshold. Unfortunately, most of the poll results are misinterpreted; the common mistake is the illusion of certainty attributed to the poll results. The content analysis findings are adopted by the experimental poll misinformation corrector design. The corrector is a human assisted Twitter robot that finds relevant media tweets about polls and corrects potential misinformation via Twitter replies. The corrector - detecting the illusion of certainty when declaring poll leaders, and results around 5% - aims to educate the actors and contribute to improving the poll media coverage.
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Effects of media consumption on attitudes towards migration
Novotný, Ondřej ; Linek, Lukáš (advisor) ; Lupač, Petr (referee)
(in English): The diploma thesis deals with the analysis of media effects on attitudes towards migration in the Czech Republic. For this, it uses data from the MEDIAN agency from 2021, which combines a questionnaire panel survey and personalized measurement of media consumption using mobile and computer applications. The work focuses on valence attitude to migration (on a scale of positive/negative) and perceived importance of migration, while testing hypotheses on different media effects according to different types of media and recipient characteristics. The analysis shows that exposure to commercial broadcasting (both directly on migration and news in general) has led to higher chances to have an anti-immigration valence attitude, while watching news on public television has partially led to a positive attitude. It has also been shown that overall TV news had a more negative effect on the valence attitude to migration compared to online media. At the same time, the analysis indicated a possible different effect of commercial media according to political interest. On the contrary, the effect of overall exposure to migration on attitude to migration or perceived importance has not been proven. Conclusions and methodological limitations, as well as recommendations for future research are discussed.
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Content analysis of negative political communication on Twitter
Kliková, Markéta ; Linek, Lukáš (advisor) ; Sládek, Jan (referee)
This bachelor thesis aims to examine political communication with a closer focus on the concept of negativity. Content analysis is subjected to posts on the social media Twitter shared by the leaders of selected Czech political parties in the given period before the elections to the Chamber of Deputies in 2021. The individual tweets are classified into categories, which analyze in more detail whether these tweets are positive or negative. For negative tweets, their content and the target of this negativity is further analyzed. The frequency with which the tweets were shared by individual political leaders in a given period is also monitored. Based on this analysis, the work draws conclusions about how selected political actors in the period under review communicated with the public and, more specifically, how they used the concept of negativity in their political communication. The structure of this work is divided into theoretical, methodological and analytical part. The theoretical part defines the context of political communication and political marketing, along with new media and the specifics they bring to this communication. Furthermore, the concept of negativity in political communication, its use, division in terms of content and also its effects are defined. Positivity is also described as...
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The Expertise of Political Parties on the Example of Presidental Elections in the Czech Republic
Formáčková, Monika ; Novotný, Vilém (advisor) ; Linek, Lukáš (referee)
The Diploma Thesis is based on the Case study of the direct election of the President of the Czech Republic. Due to this Case study it examines expertise of the Czech political parties. Is there any expertise in political parties represented in the Parliament of the Czech Republic? Why analytical capacities have (or not have) influence on policy decisions? In theoretical concept including democracy, policy work, expert capacities, elections etc. the Thesis examines the relationship between the expertise of political parties and enactment of the direct presidential elections.
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